Perl: Use s/ (replace) and return new string

Question

In Perl, the operator s/ is used to replace parts of a string. Now s/ will alter its parameter (the string) in place. I would however like to replace parts of a string befor printing it, as in

print "bla: ", replace("a","b",$myvar),"\n";

Is there such replace function in Perl, or some other way to do it? s/ will not work directly in this case, and I'd like to avoid using a helper variable. Is there some way to do this in-line?

Answer 1

No, there's no such function in perl. A possible solution is to use a do() block, like this:

my $str = do { (my $tmp = $orig_str) =~ s/a/b/; $tmp };

The temporarily lexical variable $tmp exists only in this block.

Answer 2

Untested:

require 5.013002;
print "bla: ", $myvar =~ s/a/b/r, "\n";

See perl5132delta.

Answer 3

print "bla: ", $_, "\n" if ($_ = $myvar) =~ s/a/b/g or 1;

Answer 4

If you really want, you can make your own, but I wouldn't because you have much more functionality with s/// ... you could build that functionality into your function, but why recreate something that already exists?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w    

use strict;     

   main();   

   sub main{    
      my $foo = "blahblahblah";          
      print '$foo: ' , replace("lah","ar",$foo) , "\n";  #$foo: barbarbar

   }        

   sub replace {
      my ($from,$to,$string) = @_;
      $string =~s/$from/$to/ig;                          #case-insensitive/global (all occurrences)

      return $string;
   }